• The week in Finnegans Wake: illustrations by John Vernon Lord for a new Folio Society edition; The Guardian‘s review from 1939; Christina Scholz explores Joyce’s use of the Ant and the Grasshopper fable; Sheng Yun wonders when Dai Congrong will compete the first Chinese translation of the book; Stephanie Boland on riverrun, the latest theatrical adaptation.

• It’s Robert Aickman‘s centenary year so Faber are reissuing several volumes of his peerless “strange stories”. And it’s good to see the great Clark Ashton Smith finally receive the blessing of Penguin Classics.

• The Teenage Boyfriend of the Beat Generation: Marcus Ewart slept with Allen Ginsberg (who showed him how to give a proper blowjob), and had an eight-year relationship with William Burroughs.

Yet another advocate of shorter work time was JS Mill. He dismissed the ‘gospel of work’ proposed by Thomas Carlyle in part because it drew a veil over the real costs of work, including slave work that Carlyle sought to defend. Instead, Mill advocated a ‘gospel of leisure’, arguing that technology should be used to curtail work time as far as possible. This stress on technology as a means to shorten work time was later to feature in Bert­rand Russell’s 1932 essay, ‘In Praise of Idleness’.

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• The Jealous God (1985), a comic strip by Alejandro Jodorowsky & Silvio Cadelo.
Only some pages from the sequence, alas. Though the complete story-line — in October to December 1985 Heavy Metal — is only slightly more comprehensible.

herr doktor bimler: Thanks, I thought it seemed uneven. I have scans of those issues somewhere but didn’t dig them out to examine.

Stephen: I agree, the promise of that film would always surpass the reality. Some things would have been hazardous, Dalí’s performance for one. Then there’s the length of the thing, and how you’d make some of the dull explanatory stuff work. I’ve seen the long cut of Lynch’s Dune and chunks of it are talky and horribly dull. The producers still cut far too much but Lynch isn’t the kind of director to make exposition interesting. Neither is Jodorowsky, for that matter, but Moebius had at least drawn the entire film, and it would have looked amazing.

Also, does that penguin page have a table of contents anywhere? I probably don’t need the book, I’ve already got Rendezvous in Averoigne, a few of the Subterranean Press releases, and several old paperbacks. Nevertheless, it is nice to see one of the Weird greats getting some much deserved treatment. Hopefully that guy who wrote the article that seemed to accuse all of the ‘old weird’ of harboring nazi sentiments will get some exposure to Smith’s body of work.

Thanks, Wiley (belated response–it’s been a busy week), that’s really great work. Wouldn’t have been out of place in the old Heavy Metal if there was some narrative dimension to the figures.

I’ve got most of the main CAS stories in old paperbacks but I’ll be getting the Penguin collection as much for Joshi’s notes as anything. My paperbacks, like the old Panther collections of Lovecraft, were taken from older hardback editions which contained typos and other errors. I’ve not seen a story list just yet.